The False Prometheus - Part I

From Antiquity to the Great Famine

♫ I’d like to build the world a home

And furnish it with love,

Grow apple trees and honey bees

And snow white turtle doves.

I’d like to teach the world to sing

In perfect harmony,

I’d like to hold it in my arms,

And keep it company.

I’d like to see the world for once

All standing hand in hand,

And hear the echo through the hills

For peace throughout the land.

That’s the song I hear,

Let the world sing today… ♫

For most Americans this was the initial Globalist Siren song heard for the first time back in the early 1970s.  A televised jingo played to a close-up of white, brown, and black children’s hands holding up a small planet earth.  The music continued as the image faded out and then in to a still photograph of more children from all creeds and races dressed in traditional ethnic costumes, smiling and holding hands in a circle, all facing inwards towards a glowing planet earth.  The chorus started and an iris wipe revealed yet more children, live action now, again all creeds and races, laughing and playing together with a large planet earth beach ball in an expansive green field under a perfect blue sky.  The stanza repeated, and a direct cut led to a succession of still photographs of even more smiling children, Africans and South Asians and Central Asians, cheerfully performing third world subsistence chores.  And as the final chorus began, a changing montage filled the American television screens with happy Quechua and Nahuatl children surrounded by bushels of quinoa and corn painted in two dimensional revolutionary Mestizo.  The music faded and the American viewing audience was left staring into their silent television screens with just a lone planet earth adrift in the infinite black universe. 

Globalism – it was for the children.

But then the channel got changed and the American television viewer was swung back into that familiar screaming world of frenetic hedonism mixed together with fleeting amusements.  The comradery that a case of beer brought to a group of working men.  The instantaneous relief after you couldn’t believe you ate the whole thing.  The hilarity of a chorus of singing cats.  The luxurious indulgence of Corinthian leather.  And the forbidden pleasure of squeezing the Charmin.  Who cared anyways about stuff like pollution and that crying Injun?  The world was your oyster and you didn’t like oysters so it was yours to chew up and spit out on the ground if you wanted to, and you wanted to.

Globalism – who needed it?  America took a licking and kept on ticking.

And despite the next two decades of increasingly loud and vigorous saturation advertising using every conceivable propaganda format, Globalism just wouldn’t stick to an obstinate Teflon coated self-adsorbed and amusement seeking American people.  Earth Day, World Music, ethnic food festivals, recycling, Nobel Peace Prize celebrities, incessant TV exposés lauding even more Blue Helmeted boots on the ground somewhere, nightly news coverage of starving Africans in dried up villages, and rock concerts full of well-fed Americans drowning in beer to raise money to save those thirsty Africans.  All traditional calls to the promises of Globalism went in the proverbial one ear and out the other.  Nothing in the marketing textbooks seemed to work.  Few Americans listened and only a few of those few felt the call to the cause.  Everybody just kept partying like it was 1999.  After years of carefully cultivated and scenario tested think tank strategic planning, sustained effort, and immense expense, for the average Joe Six Pack Globalism had gotten no further than Taco Tuesday.  America had become, from the board room perspective, ungovernable.

But then one day the Globalists just up and decided they no longer needed our permission.

As the new millennium approached, the Globalism multi-decade project timeline was nearing a critical milestone and had failed to deliver over a pliant and credulous American people to so much as its ostensible objectives – uniting the world in universal peace, shared prosperity, and mutual respect.  By the end of the 1980s it became clear that Americans were not going to join the kumbaya and really were going to just let all those starving Africans die.  But under Globalism’s smiling surface, a realpolitik power play emerged when the Soviet Union and its fiat empire collapsed, the Russian bear could no longer fund its military and industrial complex nor its foreign policy, and a window of opportunity opened to an unopposed grab for the swath of the world that 42 years of Cold War had held at bay.  US dollar unipolar hegemony with no viable alternative was just over the horizon, and what had previously been unimaginable was now palpably obtainable.  However, an ambivalent American people had to first be drawn in to this realpolitik for only the United States now possessed the military means and money conjuring mechanism on the scale required to seize ultimate power on behalf of and for the Globalists.  The stubborn American populace would unknowingly be drafted into a Globalist proxy army using the new Siren song of Freedom.  

Since the Globalists could not obtain power through persuasion, they would instead now use America to create a global desert and call that peace.

Within 38 years of Globalism’s November 1963 opening salvo, the apple trees had all been cut down to make Applewood smoked bacon, the honey bees were displaced by Africanized killer bees, and one could only find a snow white turtle dove bred in captivity.  The old order of “World Trade” - where trade once invoked something mutually beneficial to all parties involved - was publicly and symbolically destroyed for the entire world to see.  And in the 20 years that followed this pièce de résistance controlled demolition, a confused, distracted, and disunited American people emerged that sat idly by as it watched its birthright drain away through the black magic combination of Endless War and Financialization disguised as never ending National Emergencies requiring ever mounting quantities of freshly minted money which progressively ended up in fewer and fewer hands prompting those fewer and fewer hands to progressively demand more and more freshly minted money ad infinitum.  

This scorched earth initiative worked, and in little time a once confident and optimistic American people had been broken.  A fearful majority soon coalesced into a Tyranny of the 51% demanding not liberty and opportunity as in days past, but instead clamoring for mere assurances of physical safety and psychological security, of which each new National Emergency and resulting foreign war further eroded.  In return for these perceptions of safety and security, the Globalists insisted that Americans relinquish their expectations of an entitled future as well as their dominant position in the world order and instead dissolve into in an indistinguishable morass of global “equity”.  With this never ending procession of foreign wars, like a champion prize fighter, each title defense further wears him down, and bit by bit, brings him one blow closer to his eventual defeat.  And like an aging prize fighter, the television now presented to the fearful American public an endless procession of upstart challengers from which the old champion could not hide if he were to retain his title.

The Hegelian pieces were now in place to initiate the final stages of the globalist’s multi-decade plan to usher in their secular savior – but for a Faustian price that we are today watching unfold before our eyes where history is now no longer measured in centuries, but in weeks. 

The Globalists had prepared the Western world for its collapse and the coming False Prometheus.

Two preceding essays contain necessary background towards a comprehensive understanding of Globalism.  The first is The Evolution of Fiat Money, Endless War, and the End of History which explains how the mechanisms of war and fiat money have enable the consolidation of global power.  The second essay is Financialization and the Road to Zero that describes the mechanism by which the Globalists will destroy the Western world to create the economic collapse necessary for the implementation of their End of History and pave the way for the coming False Prometheus.

The Western Conception of the Perpetually Imperfect World

The origins of Western Civilization’s 2,500 year affliction of dissatisfaction with the world of its making can be traced back to Plato’s Theory of Forms which permeates almost every aspect of European thinking up to The Enlightenment.  This Classical ontology splits being into two parallel but mutually exclusive realms.  The first is the pure and perfect unchanging template that exists eternally for all things only as an abstraction in the world of thought.  Every physical thing and every conceivable grouping of physical things is derived from its pure and perfect abstract form - its essence - and the collection of the entirety of essence constitutes the pure and perfect and eternal abstract world.  Following from this premise was the conclusion that only through the study of essence, which is permanent and eternal and therefore transcendent of both space and time, can one ever obtain true knowledge, and thus the study of the surrounding physical world was depreciated in favor of contemplating the essence of the world rather than its substance.

On the other hand, the physical world of substance – the eidos – is the earthly realm derived from essence and consists of all manifestations of these pure and perfect and eternal abstract templates.  Each and every physical thing and every conceivable collection of physical things is merely an imperfect copy of its essence.  Try as he might, man can never replicate the pure and perfect essence of anything and is condemned to exist in an ersatz world of his making comprised only of imperfection and defect.  Thus at the core of the early Western Civilization ethos resides this premise that there is something inherently corrupt about the world of substance and mankind at best can produce only inferiority.  All of man’s actions are ultimately futile as this pure and perfect essence for which he strives remains forever elusive.  And given mankind’s nature, where he alone in his ersatz world is the possessor of will and the bearer of self-awareness, he is forever denied this unobtainable perfection for which he seeks and thus exists within an agitated state of permanent dissatisfaction with the failings and deficiencies of his creative endeavors.  Mankind is, generation after generation, in effect sentenced to an existence that never obtains that for which it desires – the essence of perfection, or the essence of essence itself.

The example of a circle is illustrative.  Regardless how many attempts man makes at drawing a circle, he can never replicate its essence – the circle’s pure and perfect and eternal abstract form.  No matter how careful he is, the diameter is never exactly constant when rotated through an entire revolution.  Despite using a high precision drawing instrument, the center of every possible diameter is never a fixed point.  Reprographics only replicate the imperfections, no matter how slight, and despite innumerable attempts, man can never draw a circle that possesses its characteristic essence - the ratio π.  Man can therefore never draw the circle, his every attempt is inexact, and his every undertaking is ultimately no more than a technical failure.  Man with his imperfect circles must not only live with his shortcomings, but also live with the knowledge that his shortcomings can never be overcome.  Thus the exercise of drawing circles becomes man’s irrational pursuit of an unobtainable irrational number. 

But then man being man, he does not limit his irrational pursuits to the mere π, nor should the pursuit of the irrational be limit to a population of esoteric and rarefied thinkers.  No, man is compelled to share his frustrations with this pursuit of essence with a wide audience.

The Development of the Grand Rewards Plan

Throughout much of the civilized Iron Age world, man’s religious activity revolved primarily around rituals designed to placate a pantheon of vain, jealous, and unpredictable Gods.  For the most part, these all-powerful deities spent their idle time plotting amongst and fighting against one another and living their immortal lives ambivalent towards man until the blood sacrifice stopped or the beautiful daughters of men caught their lustful eyes.  Mortals were born, lived inconspicuously in the shadows of the Gods, and when men died they all went to places like Sheol and ate dust for eternity regardless of their conduct or character on the surface world.  Man’s wider moral concern was confined to the provenance of those who shared his common language and culture, with all others outside this sphere labeled “barbarians” and held with contempt in low regard.  There was no abstract “good” and “evil” other than what Fate bestowed upon one and his immediate compatriots.  There was no greater good.  There was no concept of humanity as a totality of people.  Man’s primary concern was essentially restricted to what he could see in front of him and what he could envision around him.

The uninitiated man’s ancient ontology was uncomplicated and consisted of the surface world of substance and the underworld of death – i.e., the worlds of being and not being.  The world of not being wasn’t quite Nothingness, but it wasn’t life either.  The underworld instead was a sort of eternal holding pen for deceased souls and there was no credit given in this underworld for good behavior on the surface world.  Men of stature lived their lives fighting and killing their enemies, plotting their next moves of ascendency, coveting their neighbor’s wives, cavorting with courtesans, and gathering up to themselves all they could in the short and finite time allotted to them.  And men did such things without the slightest tinge of guilt or remorse, the underworld be damned. 

A universal moral ideal in pursuit of some “greater good” for a wider abstract “humanity” did not exist, and a people’s collective morality was for the most part expressed by their observance of or abstention from festivals in honor of their numerous Gods.  When adversity befell, a people generally attributed these misfortunes to a collective lack of piety in regards to such ritual observances, and admonitions regarding collective moral behavior were limited to chastisements over some improper procedure during a blood sacrifice.  The means of altering man’s collective behavior using moral ideals for the greater good of a wider abstract humanity had not yet developed, so society lived free of such controls and in a blissful innocence whereby the outcomes of its collective impulsiveness, lack of foresight, cowardice, vanity et cetera were simply attributed to a blemished goat or flecked ram brought to the sacrificial altar.

The concept of a universal savior played no part in the ancient western pantheon of religions save for the lone Titan Prometheus, creator of man who, in defiance of Zeus, bequeathed His creation with the gift of fire stolen from Olympus, which not only provided man with self-sustenance but also imparted to him the creative impulse.  Prometheus alone nurtured man into a happy and self-aware mankind, providing it with succor in its early tenuous days within the harsh surface world of substance.  But man, true to his form, built no temples to honor his benefactor and instead, out of fear and apprehension, offered up blood sacrifice to the Olympians who looked down upon man just as man looked down upon insects.  But Epimetheus, the unsophisticated brother of Prometheus, gullibly accepted Zeus’ gift of retribution, presented in the form of the nubile and seductive maiden Pandora.  This lovely and simple minded Pandora greeted Epimetheus bearing both beauty and her jar of plagues and sorrows and quickly unleashed unceasing torment into the world of men, undoing the careful work of Prometheus and relieving man of the happiness he had found under the benevolent Titan’s guidance in the company of his brothers.  And it was again the bumbling Pandora, true to her natre, who panicked and closed up her jar just before the false expectation of Hope - placed there by Zeus as a merciless joke – could escape.  Yet Pandora, by sealing up her jar, believed she had somehow saved mankind from further misery and thus forever imparted to womankind the belief it was entitled to man’s eternal gratitude. 

Prometheus alone bore the wrath of Zeus for His transgression of the stole fire – His commission of the original Original Sin – and was condemned to everlasting torture which He endured for the sake of His creation man.  And while Prometheus suffered His crucifixion and daily disembowelment at the hands of eagles, only to be resurrected the following morning in a ruthless samsara, man was left alone to make his own way in the harsh world of substance without his benefactor, with Hope denied him, with no path laid before him, and forced to share his world with the feminine progenitor of his hardships.  Man seemed destined to live his short and difficult life with only the prospect of eating dust in the end, and it was left to his sons, and the sons of their sons and their sons thereafter, to linger within the surface world of substance without spiritual sustenance or direction until the escape and return of their immortal benefactor.  Man was left condemned to wait for the second coming of Prometheus.

So with Hope trapped in a jar and Prometheus bound, man’s intellectual dissatisfaction with the world of substance grew.  Around the 7^th century BC the Avestan prophet Zoroaster began converting large numbers of adherents throughout the Persian Plateau to the new religious concept of the eternal human struggle between the light and the darkness.  Zoroaster promised men a way out of an eternity of eating dust in the underworld, and he preached an End of Times eschatology where the One Who Brings Benefit would someday descend to earth and lead his forces of light in a final great battle against the agents of darkness.  Upon victory, the One Who Brings Benefit would resurrect the untold throngs of dust eaters and, together with the living, each man would alone face his Judgement Day and a final assessment of character via trial by fire.  Should the Mark of the Darkness be etched upon their corrupt and petty heart, try as they may, the condemned could not hide their true nature from those who had come to prosecute a divine cataclysm.  Those of pure and noble hearts however would survive their trial and be judged worthy of immortality upon an earth cleansed of darkness, an earth where both essence and substance merged to form Paradise.

For the first time a righteous life provided man with an escape clause from a formerly inescapable eternity of eating dust in the underworld, and we see the beginning of a Grand Rewards Plan for good behavior during time spent on the surface world.  Now, that coveting of thy neighbor’s wife had consequences as the coveting of this new Grand Rewards Plan had certain obligations and operated like a celestial panopticon monitoring the true nature and desires contained within men’s hearts.  It was here where we see personal character transition from the Age of Heroes and its focus on external visible deeds into the pious focus on one’s internal thoughts, emotions, and desires, and henceforth the slaying of monsters and vanquishing of insurmountable enemies began to gradually lose ground to the silent heroes of probity.  Where life had formerly been a series of arbitrary and haphazard rewards and punishments vouchsafed to man or hurled down at him from on high by fickle Gods, and every death was an individual’s definitive End of Times, life now fused around the spiritual purpose of passage through a Judgement Day and into an immortal existence within perfection. 

It was here where man’s life began to be guided by adherence to or rejection of a moral dichotomy rather than day to day exigencies.  By choosing the light, man was himself responsible for creating his own admission ticket into the coming perfect world.  Life’s trinity of end goals – resurrection, Judgement, and immortality - enabled man to now shrug off adversities by ascribing them to no more than bumps in the road towards a great final purpose, as Zoroaster had finally released the prisoner Hope from Pandora’s jar.  Immediate abuses and injuries inflicted by those unconcerned with the Grand Rewards Plan could, for the first time, remain unaddressed by the victims without outwardly calling such inactions cowardice.  Instead, Zoroaster provided an escape clause from the demands of redress whereby reprisal guided by normal emotions like hatred and vengeance towards transgressors would now scar the purity of one’s heart and void that entry ticket into Paradise (terms and conditions apply).  Thus tens of thousands of years of evolutionary reaction towards harm and humiliation of both person and community began to be blunted once the popular concept of justice took hold within the righteous – i.e., the concept whereby Justice is not the natural order of things as in the strong rule over the weak, but instead justice is defined as unaddressed revenge that is redressed by divine proxies on some yet to be scheduled Judgement Day.

Zoroaster planted these individual seeds of Hope in the expectation they would grow into a flourishing garden of righteousness that filled the world with the flowers of light.  But over the coming centuries the edges of this garden would envelop Europe with a spiritual choking weed that eventually forced the entire continent into the collective cause of the Grand Rewards Plan.  However, this latent vector confined to Parthia would itself not conquer Europe, but instead would rely on intermediaries to penetrate into Europe’s pagan realms, as outside the Persian Plateau Zoroaster’s promise made scant headway into the long established Occidental religions save for two sects – The cult of Mithras and the cult of Yahweh. 

Platonism for the People and the Rise of the State Religion

The Cult of Mithras and its Zoroastrian appurtenances appear to have penetrated into Europe through westward diffusion via the Roman legions stationed at the eastern borders of the Empire between 54 BC and 217 AD while engaged in nearly 270 years of continuous war with their Parthian rival.  This cult also imported and incorporated the Oriental sun god Sol Invictus, and by all accounts Mithraism was a quiet, low profile, and popular religion.  There are few surviving written references to the cult of Mithras from contemporary Roman sources despite hundreds of near pristine mithraeum unearthed by archeology.  Like the Grecian Eleusinian Mysteries, the ritual content and purpose of the Mithraic Mysteries are today a complete mystery and little is known of this sect’s religious philosophy despite ample evidence it played an important role in late Roman society. 

But it was not this Roman Mithraism and its Zoroastrian influence that conquered the European zeitgeist.  It was instead a mongrelized admixture of adulterated Zoroastrian eschatology grafted on to imitation Babylonian mysticism practiced by the belligerent cult of Yahweh that infected and debilitated Europe. 

The cult of Yahweh claimed a genealogy stretching back to the very first human beings.  It unashamedly bragged about building the great pyramids yet escape any mention by ancient Egyptian scribes.  It boasted that it ruled Jerusalem for over four centuries yet no single civil record in its native language has been unearthed.  Neither Assyrian nor Persian conqueror bothered to mention it after capturing its purported capital.  It left no architectural imprint on Judea despite an alleged thirteen centuries of continuous occupation prior to the arrival of Roman armies.  But it did leave one very important toxic legacy – it was the template by which the Roman state administered a poisonous vaccine to its throngs of plebeians so to inoculate the disenfranchised against the virus of revolution.

It was as if the cult of Yahweh never existed until it finally made an appearance in the historical record during the 2^nd century BC where it had been a rebellious thorn in the side of the Seleucid rulers of Coele Syria.  After it broke free from the Macedonians and enjoyed a brief century of self-rule under the Hasmonean Dynasty, in 63 BC the cult and its Judean realm were conquered by the Romans and placed under direct rule in 37 BC.  But the Romans had encountered here something different in these Judeans.  Other conquered peoples routinely rolled over and paid homage to Caesar after defeat.  But the cult of Yahweh was unique in its mix of religious obstinacy conjoined to nationalistic fervor that the Romans found both difficult and expensive to pacify.  Like the Macedonians before them, the Romans faced trouble dealing with this small yet problematic group, but it wasn’t this group’s military prowess nor its numbers that worried Rome – it was this fusion between religion and nationalism that risked spilling beyond the Judean borders.  Should such a combination infect and spread throughout the wider Empire, it could easily have led to provincial disintegration and a collapse from within the Empire along cultural and ethnic lines.

Roman apprehensions were eventually realized during the First Jewish-Roman war of 66 – 73 AD where Nero dispatched the experienced general Vespasian to permanently quash this latest uprising.  It was during this minor rebellion on the scale of empire where the Roman state first encountered the problematic tenacity of religious zealotry as Vespasian prosecuted his Galilee campaign.  And it was later Vespasian’s son and future Emperor Titus, vested with Judean mop up operations while Vespasian returned to Rome to assume the title Emperor, it was Titus who during the siege of Jerusalem witnessed first-hand the self-annihilation and destruction this monster born of religion and nationalism could manifest.

Rome faced a situation whereby destroying the Second Temple guaranteed at some future time even greater resistance to the state once the cult of Yahweh regrouped and again refused to bow before Caesar.  Traditional means of warfare alone would just lead to protraction, quagmire, and great expense at the risk of spreading beyond Judea’s borders.  If the Roman state did not develop some new form of combat to deal with this localized irrational fervor, it would likely lose peripheral territory to this infectious disease.  What Rome needed was, in effect, a weapon that did not harden resolve against the state as the sword and spear did, but instead soften resistance and diverted passions away from nationalist aspirations.  What Rome needed was, in effect, a psychological warfare program.

Once Titus returned to Rome both Father and Son resolved to create a demoralizing Trinity that would inoculate the cult of Yahweh, break its nationalist ambition, emasculate its men, and render its followers morally and spiritually incapable of revolt.  Their undertaking did not require Roman legions, but instead necessitated infiltrating the rabbinical ranks, placing a reliable client dynasty upon a puppet throne that harkened back to the Hasmonean glory days, and incorporating a false history that created a pretender lineage justifying a fraudulent king not of ambition and conquest, but a King of Peace through surrender to Caesar.  Where Rome once made a desert and called that peace, it would now make a peace and call that a desert - a desert devoid of resistance to their rule where a pliant and enervate people tussled about preoccupied not with their liberty in the world of substance, but rather with their glory within the world of essence.  Thus the Flavians provided the strategy, Berenice was installed as Roman proxy queen of Judea, and Josephus produced the fabricated historical narrative.  The stage was thus set for the systematic destruction of the cult of Yahweh’s tenacious independence by way of the launch of Christianity upon the Jews.

But despite fastidious planning it was not the adherents to the vengeful, wrathful, and jealous Yahweh who proselytized to meekness – rather, it was instead the descendants of the Hellenic diaspora who had settled in Judea following its conquest by Alexander in 332 BC.  Titus’ religious conjurers had missed their mark and their creation spread rapidly throughout the Greek speaking eastern Mediterranean.  The unforeseen wider popularity of the new cult had arisen out of its democratization of Zoroaster’s Grand Rewards Plan that eliminated the formerly strict requirement of a life-long practice of righteousness, and instead replaced this difficult and uncertain endeavor with the promise of instantaneous salvation.  Salvation’s only technical demand was that one merely confess belief in this new King of Peace to get one’s admission ticket punched into the Grand Rewards Plan, regardless of one’s prior conduct during life up to and including just before the moment of death. 

So instead of attracting men of discipline and commitment, the cult of Yeshua was fruitful and multiplied among Judea’s common rabble who arose every morning and swore to begin their arduous lives of righteousness the first thing tomorrow.  And the new cult was especially popular among women, whose growing active participation in, and development of, its proto-codex threatened to overturn man’s ancient forgotten victory – the victory whereby he wrested control away from a divine and feminine lunar power that for millennia of pre-history had held his annual harvests hostage to the magical incantation of women, and whereby he re-established Justice over Eurasia with the enthronement of his masculine solar deities. 

But there were two elements embedded within this new manufacture that established at a base level a collective unconscious link to the Greek ethos – the incorporation of a surrogate Prometheus and the Theory of Forms masquerading as a theology.  Like Prometheus, Jesus was judged and crucified in the name of a God (embodied as Emperor), endured extreme suffering on behalf of man, and was resurrected after death.  To effect a split from the cult of Yahweh, Jesus was condemned to death by its members which delivered them and their descendants into eternal damnation by association.  But unlike Prometheus, Jesus underwent only a single day’s punishment, gave mankind no benefit in the world of substance save some amusing magic tricks, and then suddenly he was gone.  No great transformation was bequeathed to mankind like that with the stolen fire.  Despite Jesus’ riddles, promises, and prophecies, man was left once again condemned to pray and wait for the second coming of yet another One Who Brings Benefit.  And this wait would be made more disheartening by the Theory of Forms as man was now no longer confined to dissatisfaction with his imperfect circles, but now declared the gift of life itself defective prima facie.  Man would, at this juncture, begin to direct his life’s endeavor not towards living life, but rather towards preparation for death and ascension into the perfect world of essence. 

So what is commonly referred to as a Judeo-Christian ethos is, from a historical basis, more aptly described as Zoroastrian-Platonic.  Furthermore, there may be a great secret underlying the cult of Yeshua and its formulation from so many latent Greek concepts that can only be discovered when one considers that its original target audience was comprised not of Semitic desert wanderers who built pyramids and parted great seas, but was instead composed primarily of ordinary and prosaic Greeks.

But then the zealotry resurfaced.  The Romans had been meticulous in crafting enfeeblement and abasement into the new cult but the adherents’ dissatisfaction with the world of substance now had a theological basis and began to manifest into a religious mass psychosis.  Immolates, pillar saints, martyrs, flagellates, abstinence, abnegation, shame, and all manner of penitent self-deprecating mental illness soon followed wherever Christianity spread.  Although alarming and disturbing to the general Roman public, such insanity was divorced from any immediate risk to the Roman state.  The pernicious superstition had stuck to its tenant of leaving unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and any nationalist aspiration remained fixed upon seizing control of the Kingdom of Essence, which had been crafted so to only be accomplished through the non sequitur of victory through death.  And it was this Kingdom of Essence that Titus had astutely left unto them to quarrel and squabble and bicker over within the world of substance. 

Thus with its failure to convert the cult of Yahweh, the Romans settled in to a 90 year containment program of limited persecutions aimed at tamping down on Christianity’s spread whereby Rome executed the occasional public display to demonstrate the ramifications of not paying homage to Caesar.  That was, until the cult exploded across the Mediterranean in what today’s strategic planners would categorize as an unknown unknown event. 

Enter the Antonine Plague of 165 – 190 AD. 

For the first time since the Latin League, Jupiter had forsaken Rome.  This was a crisis like no other where neither sword nor spear offered any resolution.  From the Roman perspective, the plague was a perplexing supernatural retribution dispensed by no known God, as a God would have resorted to His divine arsenal of lightning, earthquake, drought, and insect pestilence.  An invisible enemy had descended that no Caesar could vanquish, yet Jupiter remained unmoved regardless of how much sacrificial blood flowed in his name.  As plague deaths mounted, the Empire faced a colossal crisis of faith where its ancient visceral impulse to search for answers in its errors at the sacrificial altar time and again found no transgression, but instead time and again discovered the logical conclusion that their ancient Gods had repudiated it.  Romans now frantically searched for some God that would relieve their immediate afflictions within the world of substance and, alas, found none from their existing pantheon. 

But the son of one particular god did offer the next best thing and promised to relive their miseries in the coming world of essence.  That instantaneous salvation began to backfire on Rome where not only all manner of foreign barbarian living in its midst scrambled to get their ticket punched into the Grand Rewards Plan, but many an apostate Roman citizen rushed to be baptized before death approached and the curtain drew on that last chance to profess their magical belief. 

So with Hope gone walkabout and the Roman populace facing an increasing probability that the coming world of essence would arrive sooner than expected, the cult of Yeshua grew at an alarming rate across the Roman Empire during the 15 years that plague raged across the Mediterranean, and it was at this period where Christianity solidified into a full-fledged religious movement.  The Antonine Plague presented Rome with the predicament whereby large segments of its population refused to pay homage to Caesar and thereby looked upon Roman authority as secondary – exactly the same situation it had faced earlier in Judea but now on the scale of Empire. 

The scope of what was brewing into overt mass insubordination demanded the Roman state take action.  In 250 AD the Emperor Decius issued his edict requiring all adults to perform blood sacrifice to the Gods and, upon demand, present a certificate of libellus - an early form of passport bearing a magisterial witness signature to such an offering.  This libellus – which later materialized within the Christian canon as the Mark of the Beast – this document entitled its bearer access to the necessary privileges of daily public life.  One could not buy food or sell their wares in a public market square, hold civic employment, enter a colosseum to attend a gladiatorial spectacle, nor serve in the military without this “sacrifice passport”.  And it was all justified in the name of protecting grandma from the virus of Jesus.

Decius had intended his libellus as an opportunity for the infidels to atone for their sins before Jupiter, but it served instead to solidify Christian resolve and drove them closer together out of necessity into an underground parallel economy that nibbled away at tax collection.  Such leniency only served to embolden organized Christian criminality while a second round of plague struck in 251 AD and further swelled the ranks of adherents.  So in 258 AD the Emperor Valerian issued his decree to hunt down and put to death all Christian clergy, strip titles and property from Roman citizens of the equites who had forsaken Jupiter, and cast into slavery recreant civil servants.  Nothing worked.  No matter how violent the measures, the vector Christianity continued to spread unabated.  And to make matters worse, a new popular religion emerged – Manicheanism – invading the Empire from the east and posing yet another threat to Roman traditions, heritage, and values.

Having spent his entire life witnessing the culmination of nearly a thousand years of Latin culture degenerate before his eyes, in 284 AD the Emperor Diocletian set about to unequivocally restore these Roman values.  The military was purged of Christians and the disciples of Mani were hunted down, tortured, and put to horrific deaths.  The heresies didn’t abate so by 303 AD Diocletian upped his game and issued forth a systematic religious oppression amounting to a final solution – the Great Persecution - in what would be Rome’s last unsuccessful bid to return the Empire to its former cultural splendor under a pious and upright pagan citizenry.  Churches were destroyed, ecclesiastic property confiscated, religious texts burned and icons smashed, and all manner of heretic tortured, mutilated, and executed.  No amount of violence produced the intended return to tradition and at this point the Roman state had, in effect, lost control over this Behemoth of its own creation. 

After two years of unabated brutality the pogrom subsided when in 306 AD the Empire was again placed under new management with the abdication of both Diocletian and Maximian and the ascension of the polytheist Constantius I.  This new Emperor had a new solution for dealing with the state’s religious dilemma.  His plan did not require Roman legions, but instead necessitated infiltrating the ecclesiastic ranks, creating a new dynasty within the world of substance under a reliable puppet regent, and incorporating a false history to create a pretender lineage justifying this fraudulent realm in service to the King of Peace.

This false regent would henceforth be crowned Pope.

If Rome could not eradicate this Frankenchrist of its own making, then it would discard Christianity’s true secret object – the covert worship of the Emperor Titus – and instead, would proclaim this upstart Jesus Christ as the true son of not the God Vespasian, but the son of a mere abstract “god” ruling over his Kingdom of Essence with a state sanctioned Pope serving as official intermediary between the realms of Substance and Essence.  So in 313 AD Constantius I issued his Edict of Milan formally recognizing this sanctioned Christianity’s legitimacy within the Roman Empire.  Later in 325 AD he convened the Council of Nicaea to quell the rising impulse of this newly validated religion to fragment along fissures of ideological minutiae and fight each other to the death for dogmatic supremacy and collection of the tithes.  Christians across the Empire were spared the rod as Roman agents filled the dioceses.  Women were purged from the clerical ranks, as an effective instrument of state required not the love and empathy of a Jesus, but rather the cold and merciless enforcement of a Jupiter.  And last, all use of the lunar calendar was forbidden lest woman once again put man under her magic spell and reclaim control over his annual harvest and again gain control over him. 

With church administration now firmly in the Roman state’s grip, the transition began whereby Christianity was repurposed from its original mission.  What had been designed as a movement to break rabbinical control from without over a small group of Jews in the minor province of Judea was re-engineered into an instrument to establish ecclesiastic control from within over the wider empire’s ever expanding population of Christians.  Thus Christianity became a compliance enforcement tool on behalf of the Roman state throughout the entirety of the Roman world.  Christianity had, in effect, transformed from a regional rank-and-file movement into a proto-globalist top-down bureaucratic organization.

To further advance this repurpose, in 381 AD the Emperor Theodosius I uprooted a thousand years of paying homage to Jupiter and replaced that ancient custom with the new requirement that all Romans now bow before the oriental foreigner Jesus Christ acting as official symbol of state authority.  Theodosius also put the church to work eradicating the noncompliant Mithraics and Manicheans whose numbers were significant but not large enough to warrant the complications of state infiltration and subversion from within.  Christian zealots cast off their centuries of victimhood and eagerly took up this challenge as mithraeum and temples were destroyed, initiate and elect property confiscated, religious texts burned and icons smashed, and all manner of contemporary heretic tortured, mutilated, and executed, all in the name of this loving and compassionate King of Peace.  With the remaining and not insignificant pagan urban populations living under constant duress next door to swelling ranks of volatile and homicidal Christians, many decided to forgo the birthright their forefathers bequeathed and instead converted by the thousands to the state religion. And they resigned themselves to their heresy not out of love for or belief in the Christ, but from fear of him and the likely prospect of an eternity of eating dust at the hands of his disciples. 

The supposition was that the Christ came to give peace on earth, but history tells us rather he came to foment division.  With the houses of Mithras and Mani eradicated in what amounted to a Pagan Holocaust, an emboldened Christianity was free to turn its sights upon the remaining and not insignificant numbers of stubborn conservative Roman citizens still faithful to their Gods.  These pagan holdouts were simultaneously concentrated within the patrician traditionalists of the equites and diffused throughout the rural agrarian population of the Mediterranean, yet converts to the state religion were predominantly urban dwelling Greeks, Celts, and all manner of non-Latin slave.  The military had, out of necessity, come to rely predominantly on a steady stream of pagan German recruits from the Empire’s hinterlands to replenish its declining ranks and fight the latest battle of civilizations against the Huns menacing Rome’s eastern borders.  And the ever simmering class struggle between an urban poor and a landed military-aristocracy complex, fueled by 260 years of unmitigated currency devaluations and excessive taxation, could no longer be papered over by the selective promise of Roman citizenship as so many of the Empire’s inhabitants had fallen into permanent debt slavery and were beyond any expectation of upward mobility.

So as the 5^th century lurched into its initial decade, this mutually assured social destruction permeated the entirety of Roman society.  The remaining three divided houses – obscenely wealthy Latin patricians (Philosopher Kings), ambitious German mercenaries (Guardians), and a marginalized and mongrelized everyone else who was poor (Producers) - each house had an element of its self firmly embedded within the others through a shared infection of the now terminal Christian pandemic.  The Pax Romana at this point was but a faded chimeric ideal as endless war, undifferentiated strife, and rampant inflation tore at each corner of the social fabric.  Discord raged unabated throughout an arrogant crumbling Empire ruled over by detached elites whose sole concern was to procure more power unto themselves.  All that was needed to effect the Empire’s disintegration was enough time for the relentless Christian worm to burrow through the foundations of each divided house until an external shock collapsed one and, through mutual inter-dependency, ensured destruction of the remaining two.  And so as the divided houses fought each other, the unseen worm burrowed deep and wide, devouring each divided house in a silent voracity that pitted everybody against everyone. 

But where the pagans had their Fate and Fortune with either outcome concluding with eating dust in the end and only glory was eternal, the Christians had their Hope and kept their unwavering sights upon creating the new order out of the growing social, economic, and political chaos that had engulfed every corner of existence.  They had, in effect, become fully awoke and would together fundamentally transform Roman society into the New Jerusalem within the world of substance.  The pieces were in place not only for the launch of Christianity upon the world, but for the righteous imposition of a utopian Christian globalism.

That was, until the unthinkable happened.

The Rise of the Empire of Essence and the Great Disheartening

For nearly 800 years Rome had stood unmolested by foreign sword and spear until 408 AD when the Visigoth king Alaric I marched unopposed into Italia and laid siege.  Alaric’s initial foray siphoned off not only most of the wealth from both Rome’s inhabitants and institutions, but also drained every remaining libra of priceless universal belief in the Empire’s invincibility.  Rome’s population – the largest city in the world at the time – did not sling a single arrow in its defense.  It had instead forgotten the legacy of countless devotio and cravenly bartered away its valor in exchange for the soon to be destitute lives of its people.  But rather than living to fight another day, unite, and plan the recovery of their dignity, in desperation Rome’s divided houses turned once again to the ancient visceral impulse to search for answers in their errors at both communion and sacrificial altars.  Christian found blame in the pagan blasphemers, and pagan found blame in the Christian apostates.  Neither house would discover the logical conclusion that it was not their god or Gods that had repudiated them, but rather it was an arrogant and detached state that had assigned them to collateral damage in its endless war to grow its power at the expense of all else.

Two years later Alaric again entered and sacked Rome and it was here where western Christendom changed irrevocably.  Its aspiration to create a perfect world within the world of substance collapsed and its ideal of a humanity under the benevolent rule of the ubiquitous King of Peace lay in ruins.  Public funding for Rome’s official state religion was drastically curtailed. The dole and liberal civic sponsorship of other state institutions were reduced to trickles.  Once magnificent municipal works began to crumble in neglect.  Within ten years of Alaric’s first visit, Rome’s population fell by almost forty percent through mass emigration, starvation, and conscription into slavery throughout the expanding German territories surrounding the shrinking Western Empire.  All proud spectacle ceased.  The bread and circus ended.  Pomp and hubris evaporated.  And, no glorious triumph would ever roll through Rome’s festooned streets again. 

When the Vandals arrived in 455 AD looking to claim their fair share of the urban carcass, those Romans who remained possessed neither the wealth nor the will to even bluff a semblance of resistance.  But, they did find the gumption in that defeated city to murder the Emperor as he fled, leaving the city and his Empress to fend for themselves.  The Vandals emptied what little treasure remained, destroyed the temple of Jupiter, and departed with yet another company of slaves ensuring this would be the final pillage as nothing now remained of Rome worthy of attack. 

Over the preceding 380 years the Roman pagans had watched first in revulsion, then horror, and finally resignation as their faith - once the prima facie institution from Hadrian’s Wall to the Euphrates – their faith had declined in both numbers and influence to the point where these adherents of tradition and nobility were one-by-one hunted down, forcibly brought before the Communion alter, and given no choice but bow before the graven image of the foreigner Jesus Christ under immediate penalty of eating dust for eternity.  The destruction of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the decisive sign that the long reign of their Gods had come to a close.

Christians too suffered their devastation of faith with the dissolution of the Western Empire.  They had risen from an abject state of persecution to a position of prominence only to witness that collective achievement vanish within a generation.  But the most calamitous consequence ensuing from Rome’s defeat was the money stopped flowing in to what had developed into a lucrative and lavish professional clergy accustomed to ever increasing public munificence.  With the end of the dole, now destitute parishioners could not survive on legends of manna and words of honey alone and soon demanded their rightful bread from the church.  And to make a bad situation worse, Christendom now had a heterodox rival - Arianism - making significant inroads into the annexed barbarian lands. 

If the affluence and opulence were to continue that these intermediaries on behalf of the Kingdom of Essence had become accustomed, Western Christendom needed a new benefactor and it needed one fast.  There was little wealth remaining to extract from the hands of the Italia Romans.  Any money a defenseless Rome and church received from the Eastern Empire would quickly vanish as plunder or tribute.  And the increasing burden of charity was taking a heavy toll on ecclesiastical perquisite.  This benefactor would have to not only freely bestow money upon Western Christendom, but also protect that money once it was firmly in the grasping hands of the Holy See. 

And to get that benefactor, Western Christendom would have to repurpose itself - yet again - to be of specific use to a new generation of ruler who exercised a very different political and social dynamic to that of a Roman patrician.  So the western church would gather up unto itself the asunder pieces from a spiritually disintegrated Empire of Substance and reconstruct itself into a Catholicism.  It would reinstate its original mission but this time it would be unleashed upon the Germans.

And the road to that benefactor would pass through the pious sorcery of a woman.  During the 4^th century Arrian Christianity had made strong German inroads converting the itinerant Gothic tribes of the Danube region.  As these tribes were pushed west by the Huns, they brought their competing eastern heterodoxy with them.  Although these Gothic converts added many new adherents into the fold of Christendom, their salvation did nothing to facilitate the flow of money into the Roman Catholic administration, and for all intents and purposes they were akin to gathering up inedible fruit.  One unspoiled tribe though had remained loyal to its pagan Gods – the Franks.  But in 493 their king Clovis I took a Catholic wife to solidify support among the minority yet influential Gallic clergy prior to initiating his campaign of conquest over northern Gaul.  However, it took only three years of magic spells and mystical incantations by this feminine heretic to work their desired outcome and in 496 the king forsook the likes of Týr and agreed to be baptized.  With much of northern Gaul now secured and his wife Clotilde filled with great expectation for the revival of the Christian universal project, Clovis set forth again and would surely henceforth spread peace and love throughout the unconquered tribes of Western Europe.  Yes?

No.  Clovis would not turn his other cheek as his sole objectives were earthly endeavors like power, control, and glory.  But Clovis did need the financial support of the Eastern Roman Empire, and Constantinople was still hopeful of reuniting the western half of the shattered Empire under a Catholic, albeit German Emperor.  Thus the deal was struck whereby the Catholic authority would follow in the stead of Clovis’ victories as these were the early days where religion followed the standard, and commerce followed upon the heels of both, and the commerce of these days was confiscation, tribute, taxation, and tithe.  But this new German boss was not the same as the old Roman boss.  There would be no patrocinium, but rather the imposition of a new social order that molded almost everyone into something below a peasant, yet somewhere above a slave, where none dare save through heredity expect to rise above their meager station.  Thus Clovis finished up his work on behalf of his eastern paymaster, consolidated the entirety of Gaul under one authority, and facilitated the diffusion of an expansive field-level value extraction network established and managed by Catholic agents throughout the entirety of his realm. 

But in 536 when Justinian’s Byzantine army landed in southern Italy, marched north, and seized Rome from the Ostrogoths, what should have been a glorious triumph through festooned streets crowded with ecstatic Romans was no more than a hollow symbolic victory as his Western Reconquest entered nothing more than a dilapidated shell of a once magnificent city.  And there were no triumphs either in Syracuse, Naples, nor Ravenna.  Justinian’s army “liberated” one decaying and sparsely inhabited crumbling city after another in what had once been a network of wester civilization’s crowning achievements.  The combined re-incorporation of these Italian lands into the Byzantine Empire could not produce anywhere near the amount of wealth extraction necessary to cover military expenses, let alone provide reliable tax collection for the affluence and splendor of a flourishing Constantinople.  If this military campaign proved anything, it proved that the old model of commodity end point wealth extraction from an urban population by a parasitic elite was dead and buried in Italia along with the former Western Roman Empire. 

Thus a new wealth extraction model was needed, and that new model would require a new morality to justify its ruthless and dehumanizing application.

So during the next several centuries, as the Merovingian political consolidations of Clovis unwound and reconsolidated over a larger expanse of Carolingian Europe, the Catholic syndicate dispersed throughout the Gallic heartland, dug in deep, and began its long march through the paddocks.  The prevalent Celts within the Frankish realm had long ago been vanquished by Roman sword and pacified with Roman wine and bath house, so the first order of religious business was to permanently eliminate Catholicism’s Arrian rival.  It too soon suffered a similar fate to its Mithraic and Manichean predecessors, succumbing bit by bit to both Catholic sword and salvation until in 671 the death of the Lombard Garibald – the last Arrian king - relegated this competing heterodoxy to the dustbin of extinct religions. 

The other order of religious business was to introduce and spread the moral justification for the new social order and secure that funding necessary to bankroll the resurrection of the Empire of Essence.  Given the Byzantines held control over “liberated” Rome, this introduced a pervasive threat that the Holy See’s treasures could be confiscated at a whim by the Patriarchs of Constantinople.  Such concerns over the following two centuries led the expanding Catholic dioceses to evolve into a decentralized repository for wealth accumulation protected by German Catholic kings spread wide across the lands it had converted over to the faith.  This strategy reversed the old Roman model where most wealth and power drained from the hinterlands and accumulated into the coastal cities and its development plunged the western Mediterranean into a condition bordering on poverty until the Renaissance. 

This decentralized wealth extraction and accumulation model demanded it devour more and more territory to accommodate both the swelling ranks of ambitious clergy and the increasing power of established clerics.  So from paddock to forest clearing and up and down riverine the Catholic syndicate grew one village at a time as more and more of the bellicose German tribes fell under its magic incantations and were brought under the yoke of a decentralized German authority utilizing an outsourced state religion.  In return for its service, the Catholic syndicate was permitted to issue and control the morality of a nation so it cared not who claimed the lands within which it operated.  German king and dukes got an expanding docile labor pool and the Catholic syndicate got a compliant source of reliable income and a monopoly over monastic specialty crafts.  And once this economic model covered enough of western and central Europe to establish the social equilibrium necessary to solidify it into a permanent social stasis, everyone else under its rule got feudalism.

That long march through the paddocks had two modi operandi – the first was where the clergy followed the standard in a joint venture between church and state.  Soon after pagan blood stopped flowing and their bodies were claimed from the battlefield, clergy were deployed on behalf of the new duke and fanned out throughout the subdued domain.  Their initial purpose was to conduct a field audit and assess the clerical resources needed to identify, inventory, and domesticate those value producing inhabitants within the annexed lands.  This worked well where there were already resident Celts mixed in with a population of German new comers as it was likely some rudimentary albeit non-syndicate Catholic infrastructure was already in place.  Any existing Catholic infrastructure need only be seized and scaled up to facilitate the incorporation of the resident pagan Germans acquired with the hostile takeover.  Once efficiency gains of this enlarged infrastructure were realized, greater quantities of wealth could be siphoned off agrarian societies – in excess of enough to cover both operating costs and the undiscounted profit demands of both state and diocese shareholders.  The German dukes provided protection during this transformative journey whereby the primary means of control evolved from the expensive sword and spear to a much lower cost moral imperative based upon the nearly 800 year old psychological warfare template.  

Given enough time, successive generations became inured to their subservience and targeted policing could effectively weed out the incorrigible genetic malefactors.  This resulted in a successful breeding program that suppressed revolt within the ranks of productive units who were, from time to time, given small rewards to betray those within their ranks that might dare stand to liberate them.  The occasional spirited young man of strength and grit was purposed for service to the state and apprenticed to the lower nobles.  The rare young man of delicate refinement and allure was apprenticed to the church.  Thus some ostensible form of upward mobility was established through the commission of either physical or moral crimes on behalf of both state and church.

The second modi operandi was where the standard adsorbed the clerical fruits of its independent speculative ventures.  This was a more difficult, dangerous, and time consuming effort across pagan Britannia, Caledonia, Hibernia, and ultima Thule but when a Catholic mission achieved success, those sunk costs commanded a higher equity stake to the church after the state farmed-in.  This method dispatched papal agents posing as lone, impoverished disciples who traveled beyond the periphery of western civilization and infiltrated the local barbarians to gain their confidence and market the supremacy of their new imported religion over the long established mundane local brands.  These spiritual development entrepreneurs working cold call would, if they survived the initial contact, set up their base camp in a soft and disaffected target comprised of low status subsistence farmers, assimilate as much of the local ways as they could into the new faith without compromising key components, and then move on to the next subsistence village appearing almost as one of the native inhabitants.  Once the test market proved its potential, more clergy would arrive, debriefed on local customs and necessities, and then they too ventured out into new sales territories in an identical fashion.

The aim here was to establish enough of the religious market share whereby the clergy could begin negotiation with higher order state administrators to provide them with the same kind of moral imperative to the productive units that worked so well in the established Catholic realms.  And once the venture between state and church was sealed, sword and spear went into action to convert the remaining heretics to the more efficient enterprise resource plan that Catholicism offered. 

So it went – lather, rinse, repeat.  For 900 years until the last remaining Livonian pagans of the eastern Baltic were subdued and saved for their own good.

From paddock to forest clearing and up and down every riverine, the Catholic syndicate did not rest until much of Western Europe either accepted its savior or were saved to death.  And wherever this long march passed, the German kings and dukes got a less costly means of control over wealth extraction from economic activity.  The church got its tithes, its monastic craft monopolies, and its pick of the finest catamites.  And everyone else got feudalism.  Thus the Western Roman Empire survived through its chameleon-like resurrection into the Empire of Essence.  It preserved Roman hierarchy, Roman law, and the Roman aristocratic bloodlines of those families that, as they watched their cultural heritage and political hold disintegrate, discerned in which direction the currents of history were flowing and nominated members of their wealthy houses to fill the ranks of the growing number of bishoprics.

And once the Empire of Essence had Western Europe in its grip, it would twist it and squeeze it and beat it until it made life within the world of substance a living nightmare.  It was fully repurposed this time not to just pacify a defeated combatant, but also to drive shame, humiliation, and groveling subservience into the very DNA of the collective producing class under fealty to the King of Peace.  The Empire of Essence facilitated the abolition of property rights for everyone save those affiliated with the state or the Catholic syndicate and therefore converted all productive economic activity into mere labor inputs on behalf of the nobility-clergy complex.  It policed the prohibition of travel and thereby closed all opportunity of finding a better life beyond the Master’s fiefdom.  It introduced jus primae noctis to ingratiate itself with its noble clients, a practice that weakened the bonds between father and child while ensuring enough adequate genetic specimens were sired to fill the chessboard of battle with pawns.  It made compulsory attendance of a liturgical service that was so torpid and intolerable its audience yearned to return to their muddy furrows the following Monday.  It presided over the proclamations whereby both the promise of marriage and the misfortune of death were taxable offenses, which the clergy dutifully recorded all occurrences to the Master’s ledger.  And on top of land taxes, food taxes, and salt taxes demanded by the Master, the syndicate took its due tithe.  But in return for their compliance, the producer class not only got privileges like collecting deadwood from the Master’s forest floor and drawing water from his well, the medieval producer class also got Hell.

This was not the eating dust for eternity variety of hell – this was a new and improved Hell, open for business serving not the likes of a Sisyphus or Tantalus condemned by Zeus himself, but now serving the lowliest of serfs, condemned by anemic village magistrates for the likes of stealing a piglet. 

Hell played the primary component within the medieval moral imperative.  The Catholic psychological warfare program relied heavily upon it as that old anachronistic promise of instantaneous salvation would not have sufficed alone to keep an entire population toiling in the muddy furrows for the benefit of their betters.  To achieve maximum anxiety, what was once considered merely as “bad” matured into evil, and this evil was now manifest by not only actions, but also by mere thoughts.  And thus, evil thoughts constituted an evil soul, and all evil souls would be revealed and condemned to Hell on each private Judgement Day.  The awareness of such evil thoughts, given sufficient time, would exhibit as guilt, which was in effect the gnawing fear of Hell, and that fear of Hell could be used to extract confessions and willingness to undergo an official public expiation.  Depending upon a cleric’s inquisitor skills, this fear of Hell often produced not only confessions of evil thoughts, but in some cases confessions of hitherto undiscovered evil deeds, both real and imagined.  And every effective expiation ritual dictated that punishment and humiliation be performed before a live studio audience.  So over time, as the public witnessed enough of these spectacles - up to and including mutilations and executions of the most brutal kind – over time, such violence committed by both moral and legal authority became not only normalized, but the populace became desensitized regarding violence performed against it.  Thus eventually a mass psychology developed whereby a cleric and an assistant could, on behalf of moral authority, judge and murder with impunity while surrounded by dozens of onlookers detached from the victim they had known all their lives.  And in the case when such violence was perpetrated upon an unpopular member of the village, this violence degenerated into the most extreme form of alienation from one’s fellow man – the violence degenerated into entertainment.

And this Hell-based psychological warfare program was self-policing, autonomously driven by the concept of sin, whereby sin became any evil thought or action left unconfessed and not officially expiated.  Sin was an ingenious medieval addition when considering woman, for if she should be taken into confidence regarding some moral peccadillo, she was thenceforth bound by her nature to report this knowledge as her limited emotional strength could not bear to carry alone the weight of such a burden.  All secrets fed to woman must eventually return as the vomit of accusation, so she could now couch her betrayal as her effort to “save” the transgressor from perdition.  Man, on the other hand, simply reports such to the authority and accepts a meager reward in exchange for his betrayal.  His emotional strength can bear such a load, but his back eventually breaks under the accumulated weight of debts to his Master.

This medieval psychological warfare program was self-seeking, dividing those weak seams within the village social fabric, autonomously driving a wedge between clans, factions, and associations where accuser had their feet planted in one camp, and accused within another.  The public expiation process split village after village into opposing parties, partitioning those living and toiling side by side.  It successfully generated an inwardly focused strife deflecting the accumulated animosity and grievance over one’s circumstances away from those who were truly responsible. 

Skillful inquisitors learned to shroud the accuser’s identity in convoluted legal secrecy, thereby pitting everyone against everybody in a vortex of mistrust and suspicion, purposely creating and directing outlets for hatred and physical violence between brothers and kin.  Expert inquisitors conjured fantastic accusations of maleficium from the constitutionally weak and sent entire villages into a panicked psychosis that drew more and more accused into its widening net and fueled the rising bonfires of insanity that effectively dressed over yet another social verruca that had burst open oozing with the pus of boiling civil discontent. 

And then there were those condemned souls who lived deep within the shadowy recesses of holiness, masters in the black crafts of medicine and alchemy, secretly retained by the highest authority for emergency deployment.  It was a great coincidence of medieval history by which a village that broke into open rebellion against duke or bishop found its grain supplies poisoned by the divine ergot, and exterminated to the last inhabitant on orders of a Pope who was left no alternative but to extirpate the madness of daemons that had descended upon the land.

So thus ploddeth the Great Disheartening whereby the vitality and creativity and productivity of Western European man was methodically drained by the dual vampires of clergy and state, placing him in an inexorable condition somewhere between an expiring life and a living death.  Where man’s mind debilitated from the relentless fear produced by religious psychosis.  Where man’s mere thought and his very existence constituted sin.  Where his body was enfeebled through systemic programs of malnourishment, inferior breeding, and warfare combined to cull all emergent dominant genes from the pool of serfs.  And where woman had not changed since the days of Pandora, agreeably adapting to her evolving world of ever-changing potential mischief.

 It was no wonder large numbers in society began to withdraw from the world of substance in complete surrender to the Empire of Essence.  Many filling what meager idle minutes they possessed with prayer, contemplation, and penitence, ever vigilant to avoid sin through purposeful focus of thought.  Inaction became the highest order of action, weakness of body transformed into strength of spirit, and capitulation - victory.  It was a time where man endured his life rather than lived it, silently awaiting his eventual turn at the Grand Rewards Plan.  And there was no greater illustration as to the extreme state of things than the anchorite – the crowning achievement of state sanctioned mental illness held up to all as the penultimate act of piety.  Even suicide was not an alternative as not only was the sent immediately to the eternal fires of Hell, but also his next of kin incurred a substantial penalty on his death tax owed to the Master’s ledger. 

Death itself had become a taxable salvation, life was a living Hell spent not in the creative fires of enthusiasm as Prometheus had intended, but rather in the muddy furrows of spiritually crippling drudgery, and the moral transformation from Zoroaster’s life of righteousness to that of avoiding sin in the name of the loving Christ was complete.  A choking stasis descended upon the land, life became an endless succession of thou shalt nots, and the Western European man found himself the drowning rat entrapped in some depraved metaphysical Richter experiment he could never comprehend, let alone understand.

But it was boom time for the Catholic syndicate and its clergy.  By 751 the now Catholic Lombards wrested control of Rome from its Byzantine occupation ending 215 years of wealth concealment from its partner in eastern Christendom.  So money from the pastoral bishoprics began pouring into Rome’s Holy See.  Agricultural methods steadily improved where the old Roman farming techniques were abandoned across Europe’s Catholic core, so as crop yields rose so did the resulting tithes.  Markets far and wide for monastic craft goods, bibles, and clerical services expanded with every newly acquired fiefdom.  And those expanded crop yields fed larger armies, the growing surplus financed military equipment, more ambitious campaigns ensued, and the spoils of war were more effectively secured with better equipped and well-fed soldiers.  Thus this spreading upper class prosperity culminated with the ascendency of Charlemagne and his consolidation of Franks with Lombards and Saxons under his political control.  Europe’s elite core to this point had not seen such abundance since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  Everybody except the serfs just partied like it was 799.

But the history of German controlled Europe since the sack of Rome was that territorial gains could not be held by traditional means of sword and spear alone.  Holding those gains eventually proved futile where the king relied on his sons to rally the duchies to the cause of political unity, as centuries of loose political affiliations and fluid loyalties were too deeply ingrained within the Teutonic persona.  The church itself had become a powerful rival to the state, accumulating an obscene amount of wealth spread throughout the entirety of the German realms - money that stood ready at the use of an expansive network of overt operatives skilled at bending the ears of the most powerful dukes, and covert agents equally skilled at surreptitiously undermining those very same dukes.  The kingdoms and duchies had grown so large that their centers could not hold, the state had grown to depend upon the church to keep the serfs plodding along in their muddy furrows, and the church relied on these centers holding together to preserve and protect the flows of wealth that underwrote its power and privilege.  If this symbiosis were to remain in equilibrium, a solution was required that ensured the duchies remained loyal to their king, the state allowed the church unfettered access throughout its realm, and the church continued to efficiently facilitate the transfer of goods and labor from the paddocks to the state.  Any disequilibrium in this tenuous balance would topple one leg of the three legged power sharing stool and take the other two legs down with it.  The solution to maintaining this balance was a masterpiece of medieval absurdity and the crowning achievement in the subjugation and degradation of the Western European man.  And everyone just went along and pretended that it made perfect sense.  Enter the age of Divine Kingship.

So what had begun 730 years earlier as a Roman psychological warfare program to pacify a modestly sized ornery group of defeated Jews in the Levant had grown into a metaphysical edifice used to justify the rule of exclusively German kings over a multi-ethnic impoverished Europe.  With divine kingship, this ethno-centric sublimity offered something for everyone provided those somebodies weren’t serfs, which pretty much precluded everybody from getting anything.  Political stability was enhanced as rebellious dukes were in violation of god’s ordination of his selected king and recalcitrant faced immediate excommunication by the Pope, ostracism by his peers, and an irrevocable loss of his place in the Grand Rewards Plan.  The dukes got a convoluted yet plausibly viable reason to not challenge their king during periods of abusive authority which was a handy cover for timidity.  The serfs had to obey even harder no matter how tyrannical the king’s behavior became as such cruelty and oppression descended upon them by the grace of god himself and resistance was a sin that closed shut the door to the Grand Rewards Plan. 

But the Pope got the choicest slice of this supernatural feast - he not only got to crown or depose the German kings of Europe, but gained the divine right to bestow the long dormant title of Emperor upon these same kings.  Now standing within Europe’s power structure’s sacred center, the Pope became a king himself ruling by the grace of god over his Empire of Essence.  This holy king would, as the centuries passed, increasingly challenge the rulers of the world of substance first with magical hexes, next with sacred crusades, then last with shameless mercenary force.  Thus without brandishing a single sword, the Pope became supreme arbiter between the worlds of substance and essence and medieval Europe’s most powerful figure.  The fix was in as both the medieval social order ossified and the continent partitioned into a Germans controlled empires of substance and a competing Empire of Essence ruled by descendants of the Roman patricians.  Henceforth, this détente dictated there would be no German Pope tolerated, nor ever would there be again a Roman Emperor as pre-ordained by god himself.

Up to this point the Catholic syndicate had played both German king and Byzantine patriarch for money but with the rise of German political consolidation on Rome’s doorstep, the logical solution regarding loyalty was clear.  The Byzantines were still struggling from a long exhausted treasury depleted by their unprofitable Pyrrhic wars of re-conquest across the Mediterranean and subsequent loss to the Arabs of most of these gains and their associated revenue streams.  Rome could no longer claim pious poverty as the ostentation that accompanied the inflows of money from the German bishoprics after the Lombards evicted the Byzantines could no longer be concealed.  The Catholic syndicate was therefore faced with the pending certainty they would be tasked with financing the struggling operations of their Christian brothers in the east, and so they played for time by instigating a prolonged period of manufactured religious strife over dogmatic minutiae which was an effective obfuscation of their greed and indifference towards their eastern partner in Christ.  

Like all things German though, the center could not hold and Charlemagne’s political conquests eventually disintegrated into factions of competing duchies following his death.  When the Carolingian king Louis the Child died in 911, this marked where the German political divisions first solidified into what centuries later would develop in to two of Europe’s major powers – France and Germany.  This schism arose when the duchies of central Europe ignored their Carolingian successor’s divine right and elected one of their own as king of the newly independent confederation of East Francia.  This affiliation survived its birth pangs and two coronations later in 936 the newly elected king Otto fought off rebellions from both ambitious brothers and dukes, united Central Europe with sword and spear from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and was crowned Emperor by the Pope in 962.  With the Holy See now contained within Otto’s expansive domain, the first official linkage of church and state was sealed where this political and religious union marked not only the birth of the Holy Roman Empire, but also the creation of what would later become the modern nation state. 

And playing for time had played out for the Holy See.  It could no longer ignore the Arab territorial gains nibbling away at eastern Christendom’s shrinking borders nor could it continue to reject Constantinople’s incessant pleas for the huge sums of money needed to defend its self.  By 1054 the profane use of leavened bread in eastern Christendom’s Eucharist had reached a boiling point that the Holy See could no longer tolerate.  So by the grace of god it set about to confiscate all its eastern brother’s property held within its German partner’s purview.  The patriarch responded in kind and confiscated papal properties within the dwindling Byzantine realm.  The breaking point came when Constantinople refused to send the Holy See one additional nummi no matter how many Normans accumulated on Rome’s southern border.  Thus the universal Christian project had reached an epiphany of divisions where even almighty god himself could not heal its differences of race, culture, language, geography, and history.  So the global Christian project again ground to a squabbling end that in 1204 exploded into outright hostility during the 4^th Crusade and the Catholic sack and pillage of its eastern brethren’s capital Constantinople. 

And History would henceforth blame the likes of leavened versus unleavened bread for this permanent split.  It would forever stubbornly refuse to perform the necessary mental alchemy where all glimmering colors of elevated causes are placed within the retort of critical examination, and the brown sediment that remains is shockingly found not to comprise of noble principles, but rather the all too ignoble attributes of ambition, greed, and lust to power.

A dozen pages could be written to catalogue the proceeding 300 years of medieval history following the Great Schism.  But it would be a tedious accounting whereby the historian merely redraws the European map and puts new names and dates to the long list of wars, ethnic diasporas, power struggles, shifting alliances, machinations, impositions, rebellions against impositions, countermeasures to the rebellions against the impositions, the rise of great leaders, and the eventual disintegrations of those leaders’ achievements.  Popes, anti-popes, kings and dukes both ordained and pretender, crusades north and south, territories gained and lost and regained and lost yet again, and throughout all the bloodshed and expropriation of life and property the most sublime prodigies of Christendom debated such practicalities as how many angels could stand on the head of a pin.  And throughout these 300 years, those unchanging muddy furrows far and wide every day without fail welcomed their servants upon whose backs the entire edifice existed. 

These High Middle Ages were a period like all other discrete intervals of history.  Where the proud and glorious statues erected to the victors gradually tarnish with the blight of indifference, crumble away grain by grain with each passing season, their sharp features and boastful commemorations growing effaced, clogged with lichen, and eventually illegible.  Such statues are enveloped by the fog of time when the day arises where not one soul remains who can name in whose honor such a monument was erected.  It is on that day that the end point of an historical epoch is completed.

The Great Reset

But despite the Great Disheartening, Europe basked in the benevolent sunshine of a pre-industrial Medieval Warming Period lasting from 950 – 1250 and reaped 300 years of bumper harvests that led to a steady population rise across the entire continent.  The number of Europe’s inhabitants increased roughly 45% and by 1300, Europe’s population had reached nearly 80 million laboring souls serving the wants and desires of the ensconced and entitled aristocracy-clergy complex.  And at long last, the previous 13 centuries of uninterrupted population displacements caused by migrating German tribes came to a close in 1066 when the Norman conquered England.  Although Eastern Europe was again in turmoil – this time due to the invading Mongols - that was Constantinople’s problem and a political and social stasis descended over Western and Central Europe whereby universal Germanic rule worked in lockstep with the hereditary Roman heirs of the Catholic Church.  Thus these two parties were reconciled into a power sharing polity whereby Germans commanded the Empire of Substance, archaic Romans commanded the Empire of Essence, and Roman Pope and German Emperor served as Divine intermediaries between the two realms.  So the High Middle Ages settled into Europe’s power template of competing yet complimentary dualism where the predominant sides could not exist without the other.

This aristocracy-clergy complex was however finding it difficult to completely commandeer every pound of productive flesh to its parasitic existence.  A growing cadre of intrepid peasants were no longer willing to submit to the soul crushing yoke of serfdom and severed ties to their Masters’ lands, slipped through the rapacious tithe seeking grasp of the clergy, and escaped eastward to stake claims of independence within the sparsely inhabited forests of what are today Czechia and Poland.  It was still a hard life spent in the muddy furrows, but it would be a hard life spent in their furrows.  As the imported inefficient Roman agricultural practices were replaced across Europe during this period of fortuitous weather, food production reached a point where a modest percentage of serfs could pursue full-time craft occupations.  Gradually, these dedicated craftsmen joined together to form proto-factories, these proto-factories grew into guilds, and the guilds expanded into craft confederations where one eventually blossomed into the wealthy and powerful Hanseatic League.  An expanding class of lower nobles – the ministerialia later known as k

nights - were drawn from the ranks of serfs to directly serve the dukes and provided a form of upward social mobility through democratization of the peerage.  The kings saw their power steadily decline relative to the dukes.  The Popes, cognizant of these shifting political sands, became hesitant to confer the title Holy Roman Emperor.  Even paganism saw a stubborn revival – especially among mischievous women - where the upstart cult of Freyja flourished throughout northern Europe despite considerable effort by the bishoprics to suppress its common practice. 

So as the socio-economic core of feudalism held tight during these High Middle Ages, those trapped within its lowest stratum were relatively well fed, some avenues of escape opened up for the ambitious, and embers of Hope emerged again from within the inner fires of man’s will to self-determination. 

And then came the Great Reset. 

All great resets begin with a great crisis.  History has nearly forgotten the Great Famine of 1315 – 1317.  The Medieval Warming Period had begun to wane, crop yields had declined starting some decades prior as the climate transitioned into the initial stage of the Little Ice Age, and both the civil society and social norms that had taken 850 years to jell across Western and Central Europe started their precipitous unravelling.  It started with five months of incessant summer and autumn rain north of the Alps and west of the Urals that led to total crop failure and the death of most domestic animals.  Disease and malnutrition spread rapidly as food supplies dwindled and starvation set in after the lords and clergy forcibly confiscated for themselves seed stores and what farm animals remained.  The serfs were left no choice but to eat the bugs and now they owned absolutely nothing and were not happy.  And when they could find no more bugs they turned to tree bark and what little damp and ergot infected unripen grains were available where the resulting hallucinations combined with maddening hunger revealed to them a reimagined food supply with the logical solution of cannibalism.  Thievery and murder ran rampant across the fiefdoms as neighbor stole from neighbor, stranger killed stranger for a half bowl of gruel, and mothers’ milk everywhere ran dry. 

The rains eventually merged into winter snow, but as all the seed grain had been taken by a hungry Divine Right there were no crops to plant the following spring.  The muddy furrows across Europe lay fallow and emaciated serfs everywhere stood idle.  There was no food so there was no peace as once the spring thaw commenced a hunger driven anarchy spread throughout the estates.  Starving serfs were forced to survive on what they could poach and pilfer from the lords and clergy as charity from the Empire of Essence had all but abandoned the Empire of Substance.  There was no Justice and no eternal peace in death either as tens of thousands were captured in the act of larceny, sentenced to perdition by low-level magistrates, and led away one by one to the gallows for crimes like fishing from the lord’s waterway or stealing apples from the clergy’s orchard.  God’s Gatekeepers heeded not the desperate last words of each condemned soul, who desperately advocated their case one final time as the hangman tightened the noose, pleading to no avail he could not survive upon dead wood collected off his gracious Master’s forest floor. 

Such pitiful scenes played out tens of thousands of times over the several years it took the domestic animal herds to replenish just to subsistence levels and the tortuous path that seed grain imports took to find their way throughout the medieval fiefdoms, where each hand laid upon a bushel extracted its surreptitious share and contributed to the extended misery.  And it wasn’t until the spring of 1318 when the planting of a few scattered crops could resume and an improved state somewhere between mass malnourishment and prevalent starvation was established.  Widespread deprivation and lawlessness lasted another five years and it wasn’t until 1324 that a family of serfs could once again put a full meal on their meagre table.  Europe’s peasant population was hard hit – untold numbers starved, were murdered in food related crimes, or executed for thievery real and implied.  The number of deaths during the Great Famine is unknown as the peasants could no longer pay their loved ones’ death taxes, so with this reliable income stream suspended the clergy stopped recording them.  And these same peasants could no longer afford the gratuity for their newborns’ baptisms, so few peasant births were recorded, and without these baptisms the clergy thus knowingly denied untold numbers of starving infants approaching inescapable death their ascension into the Kingdom of Essence, and thereby created a generation of condemned tiny souls for the wont of a bag of barley corns. 

When the Great Famine subsided, something had permanently changed within the peasants’ collective psyche.  There was something palpably and irrevocably not right about feudalism’s return to the semblance of normalcy.  It wasn’t so much that the serfs had spent nine agonizing years witnessing the absolute uselessness of the aristocracy-clergy complex, but rather had experienced to a man the true brutal and inimical nature of the feudal social contract.  It wasn’t so much either that in the final years of this hunger driven upheaval that most every member of the aristocracy-clergy complex seemed to elude deprivation, but rather they instead emerged from the chaos energized and more powerful than before the calamity befell.  And in fact, the ruling class had used the crisis as a unique window of opportunity to not only foreclose on debtors, but to accumulate additional swaths of land held by many a starving freedman, merchant, and lower noble often using as payment the very same grain and animals they had earlier confiscated by Divine Right from the desperate sellers.  

The ruling class had used the famine to quash all but the hardiest upstarts and drove most of those operating outside of feudalism’s wealth extraction modus operandi back into its venal clutches.  It had not only flattened the curve of peasant ambition, it had, through massive acquisition and consolidation of privately held land, managed to build back feudalism better.  The ruling class could again party like it was 799.

But the clergy bears special responsibility for the civil alienation that wedged between peasant and ruler that over time, like a slowly festering splinter that cannot be removed, oozes with the pus of societal necrosis and putrefies into a life threatening wound only the surgeon of great social revolution can heal.  Medieval clergy were not yet initiated into the mysteries of atmospheric trace gases and its magical influence upon weather, so as there was no medieval science per se, logic stands that the science was not yet settled regarding the Great Famine’s root cause.  What medieval clergy did possess was a repertoire of standard issue denouncement and castigation that had been clinically trialed over the centuries and stood the test of time when applied to spiritually ambitious individuals or discrete outbreaks of community blasphemy separated from wider society, but had hitherto not been trialed and peer reviewed upon the entirety of peasant society. 

So a great experiment began whereby all of Catholic Europe’s productive class were mandated Sunday doses of vitriolic imputation and upbraid.  The incessant negative indoctrination was engineered to reconfigure each recipient’s psychic DNA to continuously manufacture and deliver in situ the poison spikes of perpetual guilt coursing through their veins.  This prescription either swelled each recipient’s heart with a shame that shed and cross-infected society’s communal veins, or it clogged the arteries of logic coursing through each recipient’s mind.  The clerical science had deemed such prophylactic countermeasures safe and effective – to themselves – but its sinister objective was to vitiate that natural herd immunity to censure and rebuke possessed by strong beings until a pandemic of shared culpability became contagion among all serfdom.  Once diseased and exhausted, the productive class could be blamed for everything, summarily judged guilty prima facie not only for this Great Famine weather calamity, but hereafter for every subsequent weather disaster to ever befall Europe.  Hence, the productive class would forever be dependent upon the confessional booster cycle and its antibodies delivered via clerical forgiveness – at an ever steepening psychological price that inherently came with trusting the clerical science - as the Catholic syndicate and it alone held monopoly over the antidote to an eternity spent suffering in hell. 

So with blame for every misfortune now by default piled onto the peasants, the aristocracy-clergy complex set about to garner every occurrence of fortune to its self.  Its first post-famine order of business was to lay claim to the return of normal weather, restored only through its direct line of communication to god almighty himself.  Thus the template of thesis – antithesis - synthesis residing within the abstract Empire of Essence made its first imperfect appearance within the Empire of Substance through the non-intellectual power play of problem – blame – non-solution solution.  But what the clerical science had inadvertently resurrected was none other than the Christian raison d’être and its original psychological warfare program, now new and improved with the additional preposterous premise that should the productive class ever turn against its rulers, they would be attacking the very source of fortuity within the world of substance and guarantee none other than celestial retribution and misery upon everyone throughout the lands.  The clerical scientists had developed Europe’s first system of universal consequence resulting from collective action.  They had, in response to this Great Famine, created the psychic milieu where everybody was in it together and had discovered the rudimentary moral foundations of communism, a form of proto-globalism confined to the boundaries of moral and physical authority exercised by the ruling class who resided within those boundaries.

Within its blame shifting calculus the clerical scientists had crucially neglected to recognize that peasant society was already culpable, but not for the bad weather.  The serfs had spent nine tortured years hiding their crimes within the world of substance.  Scores had, with forethought, taken food from the starving, beaten the innocent for a slice of bread, remained silent to cover their crimes while the innocent climbed the gallows ladder, and murdered countless unfortunate souls who had stumbled upon their larcenies.  They were already damned and the clergy’s pretentious bluster could never crack this new hardened and impervious medieval zeitgeist.  The productive class had, contrary to the clerical scientists’ intentions, acquired through immeasurable hardship a robust immunity to even the most bloviating sermon. 

What could mere words do to them now when many a man was left living what life remained as a brief respite until the scorching embrace of an eternal hell enveloped him?  A life of burring inside, a fire that kindled deeper and fiercer with every passing recollection of that day when Divine Right came calling on the village demanding food and – to a man – each stood by and watched as the Blameless went house to house and hauled away the last sacks of corn destined to fatten the lord’s hogs. 

And how the women seethed as they sat in the pews presided over by those same priests who had refused to confer the last rites upon their dying parents, nor would baptize their doomed infants, for the lack of gratuities.  All the pompous and hypocritical accusations, hurled down from the bully pulpits, were now drowned out in a flood of remorseful memories of those unbaptized infants, alone and afraid and impure, forever uncomprehending of their fate within the searing pain of hell’s inferno.  

Something had permanently changed across Europe after the Great Famine.  The implacable corruption, the intractable arrogance, the sheer unyielding malevolence and ruthless uselessness of the ruling class had unintentionally written, with its own hand, the first few pages of what we would later refer to as modern European history.  In metaphysical terms, by 1345 it was the cusp of the Great Reset.

And then the real crisis began.  And so to the real opportunity began…

Epilogue, Part I

The end of the Great Famine represented a nadir for Western Europe’s productive class, and a zenith for its parasitic ruling class, the relative depths and heights of which neither had been experienced since the days just before Alaric sacked Rome.  But the social sclerosis that fused a German peerage to a Roman clergy that together had ruled over Europe for nearly 850 years would not hold much longer.  The Great Famine had been that great crisis that had awoken the serfs who were now, in growing numbers, agitated and turning to large scale revolts as a way out of their suffocating and deadly bondage.  All that was needed now was a push to this tottering social equilibrium to break the shackles, and history would soon deliver a thrust the likes of which Europe had never witnessed.

During the Great Famine, had the aristocracy-clergy complex given even perfunctory succor to the productive class then Part II of this essay would probably have been merely an extension of the socio-economic conditions prevalent during the High Middle Ages.  But the ruling class had overplayed its hand after the famine and expected those serfs who hadn’t starved to death to just get back in line and return to their muddy furrows.  The serfs had experienced however one of those rare points on History’s continuum where, from no transgression of their own, they had unequivocally been abandoned by their god.  Despite centuries of collective obedience, piety, and humility - all in the face of arrogance, cruelty, and hypocrisy - the serfs were left precisely at the same juncture of resignation as those equally pious Romans who gathered to stare into the ruins of their temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. 

They had, to a man, had been left to ponder the exceptional riddle of humanity -

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.

Is God able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.

Is God both able and willing?  Then whence cometh evil?

Is God neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?

It is during such times of resignation when man is, once again, left to wait and hope for the coming of a One Who Brings Benefit.  But this coming would not arrive in the form of a benevolent fire, but rather as a test of resolve where the tuition is paid to the invigilator of Fate with the lives and blood of untold millions.  The discretized and fragmented productive class – crafted through centuries of meticulous clerical science - would come to realize that it had been presented with a false Prometheus, a pretender who cared not for the welfare of his alleged creation, but instead claimed to bring it forth only to shower it with punishment during the brutish and short time allotted it within the world of substance. 

They would test this riddle of humanity in search of the true Prometheus, and in return the riddle would test them.